Sunday, January 01, 2012

Ron Paul is a terrible embarrassment to American 'progressives' as their opposition to his campaign demonstrates how deeply reactionary they really are. In particular, Paul highlights the the dominant neo-liberal strain in American progressivism of supporting the financing of war. War financing is the heart of the modern American apparatus of state, and the state is what creates social programs and enforces modern progressive social order. This is particularly true as the business base of the country is hollowed out, leaving the business of war - and the printing of money - as the only financial basis left to support social programs.

"And as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to
acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out
years ago by Christopher Laesch) and what is a long-standing,
disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized
war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the
anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions
that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.
...

Paul is deeply conservative, of course, and there are reasons he
believes in those end goals that have nothing to do with creating a more
socially just and equitable society. But then, when considering
questions about Ron Paul, you have to ask yourself whether you prefer a
libertarian who will tell you upfront about his opposition to civil
rights statutes, or authoritarian Democratic leaders who will expand
healthcare to children and then aggressively enforce a racist war on
drugs and shield multi-trillion dollar transactions from public
scrutiny. I can see merits in both approaches, and of course, neither is
ideal. Perhaps it’s worthy to argue that lives saved by presumed
expanded health care coverage in 2013 are worth the lives lost in the
drug war. It is potentially a tough calculation (depending on whether
you think coverage will in fact expand in 2013). When I worked with
Paul’s staff, they pursued our joint end goals with vigor and principle,
and because of their work, we got to force central banking practices
into a more public and democratic light.
But this obscures the real question, of why Paul disdains the Fed
(and implicitly, why liberals do not), and the relationship between the
Federal Reserve and American empire. If you go back and look at some of
libertarian allies, like Fox News’s Judge Napolitano, they will answer
that question for you. Napolitano hates, absolutely hates, Abraham
Lincoln. He sometimes slyly refers to Lincoln as America’s first
dictator. Libertarians also detest Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano
Roosevelt.What connects all three of these Presidents is one thing – big ass wars, and specifically, war financing.
If you think today’s deficits are bad, well, Abraham Lincoln financed
the Civil War pretty much entirely by money printing and debt creation,
taking America off the gold standard. He oversaw the founding of the
nation’s first national financial regulator, the Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency, which chartered national banks and forced
them to hold government debt to back currency they issued. The dollar
then became the national currency, and Lincoln didn’t even back those
dollars by gold (and gold is written into the Constitution). This
financing of the Civil War was upheld in a series of cases over the
Legal Tender Act of 1862. Prior to Lincoln, it was these United States. Afterwards, it was the
United States. Lincoln fought the Civil War and centralized authority
in the Federal government to do it, freeing slaves and transforming
America into one nation.
Libertarians claim that they dislike Lincoln because he centralized
authority in the Federal government. Of course, there is a long
reconstructed white supremacist strain that hates Lincoln because he was
an explicitly anti-racist President, and they hate the centralized
authority and financing power that freed the slaves and turned America
increasingly into more racially equitable society. This strain can be
exploited by the creditor class, who also disliked how slavery – which
they saw as a property right rather than a labor and human rights issue –
was destroyed by state power. History, of course, has a nasty way of
mocking us about long-held fights we thought were over. The conflict
between labor/human rights and property rights continues today. Or as
Carl Fox said in the movie Wall Street, “The only difference
between the Pyramids and the Empire State Building is the Egyptians
didn’t allow unions.” Without even getting into globalization, prison
labor legally makes body armor, as well as products for victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, and Microsoft. State centralized power can prioritize labor rights over property rights, and for this reason, creditors are wary of it.
On to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson signed the highly controversial Federal
Reserve Act in 1913; originally, the Federal Reserve system was supposed
to discount commercial and agricultural paper. Government bonds were
not really considered part of the system’s mandate. But what happened
the next year? Yes, World War I. And Wilson, who ran on the slogan “he
kept us out of war” in 1916, started a long tradition of antiwar
Democratic Presidents who took America to war (drawing the ire of among
others Helen Keller, but garnering the support of union leader Sam
Gompers who argued it was a “people’s war”). Wilson also implemented a
wide variety of highly repressive authoritarian measures, including the
Palmer Raids, the Espionage Act of 1917, and the use of modern PR
techniques by government agencies. For good measure, Wilson was an
unreconstructed white supremacist (even a bit out there for the time)
and sent many antiwar opponents to jail. In the monetary arena, Wilson’s
new Federal Reserve system began discounting government bonds. Like
Lincoln, he had set up a tremendous war financing vehicle to centralize
capital flows and therefore, political authority. In many ways, Wilson
set up the rudiments of America’s police state, and did so arguably to
help a transatlantic Anglo-American banking elite. Here, one can argue
that libertarians are wary of centralized financing and political
authority for liberal reasons – the ACLU was founded after the Palmer
raids.
And finally, we come to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s Fed is
a bit more complex, because he did centralize monetary authority using
wartime emergency powers, but he did so in peacetime. FDR abrogated gold
clause contracts, seized the domestic supply of gold, and devalued the
currency. He constrained banks with aggressive regulation and seizures
of insolvent banks, saving depositors with the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation. He also used the RFC to set up much of what we know today
as the Federal government, including early versions of disaster relief,
small business lending, massive bridge and railroad building, the FHA,
Fannie Mae, and state and local aid. Eventually, the government used
this mechanism to finance college and housing for veterans with the GI
Bill. Since veterans were much of the population right after World War
II, effectively this was the first ever near-national safety net. FDR
also fused the liberal and union establishments with the corporate
world, creating the hybrid “military-industrial” complex that is with us
to this day (see Alan Brinkley’s “End of Reform” for a good treatment of this process).Later, this New Deal financing apparatus was used to finance the
munitions industry and America’s role in World War II. At one point, the
RFC owned eight war material producing subsidiaries, including the
synthetic rubber industry. Importantly, FDR had the Fed working for him.
The Fed kept interest rates pegged at an interest rate set by Treasury,
and used reserve requirements to manage inflation. This led to a
dramatic drop in inequality, and unemployment sank to 1% during World War II.
In 1951, the Fed, buttressed by what Tom Ferguson calls “conservative
Keynesian” corporate leaders, broke free of this arrangement, under the
Treasury-Fed Accord, leading to the postwar monetary order. That accord
is where the vaunted “Federal Reserve Independence” came from.
Now, if you’re a libertarian, and you believe that centralized power
is dangerous, then it’s obvious that state control over finance and mass
mobilization of social resources for warfare or other ends are two
sides of the same coin. If you fear social spending, you could also be
persuaded to believe that any financing mechanism for mass social
spending is problematic. Creditors might just dislike the possibility of
any state power centers that could challenge their hegemony and
privilege labor/human rights over their property rights, though they do
support captive state systems they control. If you are a white
supremacist, centralized power can easily be viewed as a threat to
racial homogeny, since historically it has acted as such in the past.
But if you are against war, or you believe that a centralized state is
likely to act in an unjust or repressive manner (as it also has in the
past), then war financing is a reasonable target.
Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of
Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the
civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by
Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were
enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate,
journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole
system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be
they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the
anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized
authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be
immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the
corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society,
Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the
technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist
much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a
profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to
the 1930s don’t work.This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American
empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas,
arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance
should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural
critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there
isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war
on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as
the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big
finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a
glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and
problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in
American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue
the way it has. And there’s no reason to assume that centralized power
will act in a more just manner these days, that we will see continuity
with the historical experience of the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. The
liberal alliance with the mechanics of mass mobilizing warfare, which
should be pretty obvious when seen in this light, is deep-rooted.
What we’re seeing on the left is this conflict played out, whether it
is big slow centralized unions supporting problematic policies, protest
movements that cannot be institutionalized in any useful structure, or a
completely hollow liberal intellectual apparatus arguing for increasing
the power of corporations through the Federal government to enact their
agenda. Now of course, Ron Paul pandered to racists, and there is no
doubt that this is a legitimate political issue in the Presidential
race. But the intellectual challenge that Ron Paul presents ultimately
has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with contradictions
within modern liberalism."

It is difficult not to think of Bill and Barry as you read the history. Note that all the 'progressives' commenting on this article try to change the subject, just as Stoller suggested they would. I like to call American progressives 'progressives for carpet bombing', and their recent support for the imperialist slaughter in Libya is completely in character for them.

"The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the
central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul”
is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will
reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to
liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position?
The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can
identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it
means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even
consider praising any part of their candidacy.
The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by
progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew
of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he
has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought
to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the
power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American
citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged
an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which
was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the
War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal
accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war
even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
He has entrenched
for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism
powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege
as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has
shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He
has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including
those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which
devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons
huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered
thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance
State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before.
The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Postjust dubbed a
vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of
secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to
what Dana Priest and William Arkin called
“Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well,
building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create
the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (includingObama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.
The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for
President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to
be pernicious. I know it’s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives
like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace,
opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the
military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to
individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these
facts — like the history laid out by Stoller in that essay — negate that
desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader
progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct
opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short
of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to
pretend they don’t exist. And there’s a corresponding hostility toward
those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored.
The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these
listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently
opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates,
only by Ron Paul. For that reason, Paul’s candidacy forces progressives
to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the
person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in
the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would
receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either
agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views."

Of course, as Greenwald lists things progressives aren't supposed to notice, he fails to list the Jewish blackmail of the United States by control of the Fed, and the fact that all the wars the Americans are blackmailed into fighting are Wars For The Jews. For Greenwald, Paul is a useful candidate, but not a plausible or desirable President. He is just a goad to remind Barry he has to do better. Too bad it won't work.

Ron Paul is a terrible embarrassment to American 'progressives' as their opposition to his campaign demonstrates how deeply reactionary they really are. In particular, Paul highlights the the dominant neo-liberal strain in American progressivism of supporting the financing of war. War financing is the heart of the modern American apparatus of state, and the state is what creates social programs and enforces modern progressive social order. This is particularly true as the business base of the country is hollowed out, leaving the business of war - and the printing of money - as the only financial basis left to support social programs.

"And as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to
acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out
years ago by Christopher Laesch) and what is a long-standing,
disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized
war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the
anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions
that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.
...

Paul is deeply conservative, of course, and there are reasons he
believes in those end goals that have nothing to do with creating a more
socially just and equitable society. But then, when considering
questions about Ron Paul, you have to ask yourself whether you prefer a
libertarian who will tell you upfront about his opposition to civil
rights statutes, or authoritarian Democratic leaders who will expand
healthcare to children and then aggressively enforce a racist war on
drugs and shield multi-trillion dollar transactions from public
scrutiny. I can see merits in both approaches, and of course, neither is
ideal. Perhaps it’s worthy to argue that lives saved by presumed
expanded health care coverage in 2013 are worth the lives lost in the
drug war. It is potentially a tough calculation (depending on whether
you think coverage will in fact expand in 2013). When I worked with
Paul’s staff, they pursued our joint end goals with vigor and principle,
and because of their work, we got to force central banking practices
into a more public and democratic light.
But this obscures the real question, of why Paul disdains the Fed
(and implicitly, why liberals do not), and the relationship between the
Federal Reserve and American empire. If you go back and look at some of
libertarian allies, like Fox News’s Judge Napolitano, they will answer
that question for you. Napolitano hates, absolutely hates, Abraham
Lincoln. He sometimes slyly refers to Lincoln as America’s first
dictator. Libertarians also detest Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano
Roosevelt.What connects all three of these Presidents is one thing – big ass wars, and specifically, war financing.
If you think today’s deficits are bad, well, Abraham Lincoln financed
the Civil War pretty much entirely by money printing and debt creation,
taking America off the gold standard. He oversaw the founding of the
nation’s first national financial regulator, the Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency, which chartered national banks and forced
them to hold government debt to back currency they issued. The dollar
then became the national currency, and Lincoln didn’t even back those
dollars by gold (and gold is written into the Constitution). This
financing of the Civil War was upheld in a series of cases over the
Legal Tender Act of 1862. Prior to Lincoln, it was these United States. Afterwards, it was the
United States. Lincoln fought the Civil War and centralized authority
in the Federal government to do it, freeing slaves and transforming
America into one nation.
Libertarians claim that they dislike Lincoln because he centralized
authority in the Federal government. Of course, there is a long
reconstructed white supremacist strain that hates Lincoln because he was
an explicitly anti-racist President, and they hate the centralized
authority and financing power that freed the slaves and turned America
increasingly into more racially equitable society. This strain can be
exploited by the creditor class, who also disliked how slavery – which
they saw as a property right rather than a labor and human rights issue –
was destroyed by state power. History, of course, has a nasty way of
mocking us about long-held fights we thought were over. The conflict
between labor/human rights and property rights continues today. Or as
Carl Fox said in the movie Wall Street, “The only difference
between the Pyramids and the Empire State Building is the Egyptians
didn’t allow unions.” Without even getting into globalization, prison
labor legally makes body armor, as well as products for victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, and Microsoft. State centralized power can prioritize labor rights over property rights, and for this reason, creditors are wary of it.
On to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson signed the highly controversial Federal
Reserve Act in 1913; originally, the Federal Reserve system was supposed
to discount commercial and agricultural paper. Government bonds were
not really considered part of the system’s mandate. But what happened
the next year? Yes, World War I. And Wilson, who ran on the slogan “he
kept us out of war” in 1916, started a long tradition of antiwar
Democratic Presidents who took America to war (drawing the ire of among
others Helen Keller, but garnering the support of union leader Sam
Gompers who argued it was a “people’s war”). Wilson also implemented a
wide variety of highly repressive authoritarian measures, including the
Palmer Raids, the Espionage Act of 1917, and the use of modern PR
techniques by government agencies. For good measure, Wilson was an
unreconstructed white supremacist (even a bit out there for the time)
and sent many antiwar opponents to jail. In the monetary arena, Wilson’s
new Federal Reserve system began discounting government bonds. Like
Lincoln, he had set up a tremendous war financing vehicle to centralize
capital flows and therefore, political authority. In many ways, Wilson
set up the rudiments of America’s police state, and did so arguably to
help a transatlantic Anglo-American banking elite. Here, one can argue
that libertarians are wary of centralized financing and political
authority for liberal reasons – the ACLU was founded after the Palmer
raids.
And finally, we come to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s Fed is
a bit more complex, because he did centralize monetary authority using
wartime emergency powers, but he did so in peacetime. FDR abrogated gold
clause contracts, seized the domestic supply of gold, and devalued the
currency. He constrained banks with aggressive regulation and seizures
of insolvent banks, saving depositors with the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation. He also used the RFC to set up much of what we know today
as the Federal government, including early versions of disaster relief,
small business lending, massive bridge and railroad building, the FHA,
Fannie Mae, and state and local aid. Eventually, the government used
this mechanism to finance college and housing for veterans with the GI
Bill. Since veterans were much of the population right after World War
II, effectively this was the first ever near-national safety net. FDR
also fused the liberal and union establishments with the corporate
world, creating the hybrid “military-industrial” complex that is with us
to this day (see Alan Brinkley’s “End of Reform” for a good treatment of this process).Later, this New Deal financing apparatus was used to finance the
munitions industry and America’s role in World War II. At one point, the
RFC owned eight war material producing subsidiaries, including the
synthetic rubber industry. Importantly, FDR had the Fed working for him.
The Fed kept interest rates pegged at an interest rate set by Treasury,
and used reserve requirements to manage inflation. This led to a
dramatic drop in inequality, and unemployment sank to 1% during World War II.
In 1951, the Fed, buttressed by what Tom Ferguson calls “conservative
Keynesian” corporate leaders, broke free of this arrangement, under the
Treasury-Fed Accord, leading to the postwar monetary order. That accord
is where the vaunted “Federal Reserve Independence” came from.
Now, if you’re a libertarian, and you believe that centralized power
is dangerous, then it’s obvious that state control over finance and mass
mobilization of social resources for warfare or other ends are two
sides of the same coin. If you fear social spending, you could also be
persuaded to believe that any financing mechanism for mass social
spending is problematic. Creditors might just dislike the possibility of
any state power centers that could challenge their hegemony and
privilege labor/human rights over their property rights, though they do
support captive state systems they control. If you are a white
supremacist, centralized power can easily be viewed as a threat to
racial homogeny, since historically it has acted as such in the past.
But if you are against war, or you believe that a centralized state is
likely to act in an unjust or repressive manner (as it also has in the
past), then war financing is a reasonable target.
Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of
Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the
civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by
Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were
enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate,
journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole
system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be
they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the
anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized
authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be
immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the
corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society,
Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the
technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist
much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a
profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to
the 1930s don’t work.This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American
empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas,
arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance
should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural
critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there
isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war
on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as
the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big
finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a
glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and
problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in
American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue
the way it has. And there’s no reason to assume that centralized power
will act in a more just manner these days, that we will see continuity
with the historical experience of the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. The
liberal alliance with the mechanics of mass mobilizing warfare, which
should be pretty obvious when seen in this light, is deep-rooted.
What we’re seeing on the left is this conflict played out, whether it
is big slow centralized unions supporting problematic policies, protest
movements that cannot be institutionalized in any useful structure, or a
completely hollow liberal intellectual apparatus arguing for increasing
the power of corporations through the Federal government to enact their
agenda. Now of course, Ron Paul pandered to racists, and there is no
doubt that this is a legitimate political issue in the Presidential
race. But the intellectual challenge that Ron Paul presents ultimately
has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with contradictions
within modern liberalism."

It is difficult not to think of Bill and Barry as you read the history. Note that all the 'progressives' commenting on this article try to change the subject, just as Stoller suggested they would. I like to call American progressives 'progressives for carpet bombing', and their recent support for the imperialist slaughter in Libya is completely in character for them.

"The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the
central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul”
is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will
reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to
liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position?
The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can
identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it
means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even
consider praising any part of their candidacy.
The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by
progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew
of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he
has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought
to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the
power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American
citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged
an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which
was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the
War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal
accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war
even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
He has entrenched
for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism
powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege
as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has
shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He
has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including
those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which
devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons
huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered
thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance
State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before.
The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Postjust dubbed a
vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of
secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to
what Dana Priest and William Arkin called
“Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well,
building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create
the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (includingObama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.
The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for
President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to
be pernicious. I know it’s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives
like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace,
opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the
military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to
individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these
facts — like the history laid out by Stoller in that essay — negate that
desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader
progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct
opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short
of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to
pretend they don’t exist. And there’s a corresponding hostility toward
those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored.
The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these
listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently
opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates,
only by Ron Paul. For that reason, Paul’s candidacy forces progressives
to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the
person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in
the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would
receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either
agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views."

Of course, as Greenwald lists things progressives aren't supposed to notice, he fails to list the Jewish blackmail of the United States by control of the Fed, and the fact that all the wars the Americans are blackmailed into fighting are Wars For The Jews. For Greenwald, Paul is a useful candidate, but not a plausible or desirable President. He is just a goad to remind Barry he has to do better. Too bad it won't work.